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Welcome to the BRL-CAD community publication portal. This page is dedicated to the preparation and editing of community publications for BRL-CAD. Proposed and upcoming publications are listed with their individual editorial status. You are welcome and encouraged to help share news about recent events or current activities taking place within the BRL-CAD community by writing an article. Community editing is welcome.

Ready for Publication

These are articles ready for publication. Release notes should follow a release and get published within the first week of the month. Other publications should be scheduled one or two weeks later, ideally on the third week of the month.

Note: if you see a comment indicating that a section is FROZEN, any changes you make in that section may go unnoticed as the article is being prepared for distribution. If you find errors in a FROZEN article, go ahead and correct the article but contact Sean (brlcad on freenode IRC) who may be able to incorporate changes during final publication.

TBD

Final Editorial Review

These should be "complete" articles. The author is done with the content and all that remains is a review of structure, grammar, voice, punctuation, and spelling. Images may be added as well.

Release 7.20.2

BRL-CAD 7.20.2 is now available! The 7.20 release marks the introduction of a new CMake-based build system for BRL-CAD. Improvements continue to be made on geometry conversion and tessellation to polygonal formats. Efforts to merge MGED and Archer for an upcoming combined alpha release continue with numerous command improvements, bug fixes, and interface enhancements.

CMake is cross-platform infrastructure capable of generating build files for a wide variety of operating systems and compilation environments. Cliff Yapp has been diligently adapting BRL-CAD to CMake for several months in order to simplify our cross-platform development. Previously, two separate build systems were being maintained -- one system (GNU Autotools) for Linux, UNIX, and BSD platforms (including Mac OS X); and another separate system (Microsoft Visual Studio) for Windows. The new build system supports all platforms (including Windows) from the same build logic. This eliminates the need to manually update multiple build systems and improves BRL-CAD cross-platform maintainability.

improved fusing of coplanar faces (tessellation) - Richard Weiss

fixed rtwizard issues with unknown units and freezing - Bob Parker

fixed problem with mater command setting color - Cliff Yapp

fixed crash rendering scenes with all invalid lights - Sean Morrison

improved reliability of ARS tessellation/conversion - Richard Weiss

improved tessellation performance and reliability - Richard Weiss

replaced 'erase_all' command with 'erase -r' - Brandon Hinesley

improved 'ls' command error reporting in archer - Brandon Hinesley

fixed related object highlighting in archer's tree view - Cliff Yapp

added closedb command to archer - Brandon Hinesley

improved behavior of opendb command in archer - Brandon Hinesley

improved archer/mged manual page browser behavior - Brandon Hinesley

added man documentation command to archer - Brandon Hinesley

improved File->New dialog in mged - Brandon Hinesley

all cmake files now included in dist - Erik Greenwald, Sean Morrison

cross-platform 64-bit ISST (cmake-only) - Cliff Yapp, Erik Greenwald

fixed mged zoom out mouse binding on Linux/*BSD - Cliff Yapp

improved multiple path handling for search command - Cliff Yapp

fixed segment splitting tessellation conversion bug - Richard Weiss

fixed crash during facetization of large models - Richard Weiss

fixed asc2g bug importing color and other attributes - Bob Parker

added -q "quiet lookup" option to the 'ls' command - Cliff Yapp

fixed numerous 'red' command text edit bugs and robustness issues

Cliff Yapp, Sean Morrison

modification of LIBRT spatial partition traversal ordering

Sean Morrison, Keith Bowman

new LIBRT_BOT_MINTIE environment variable override - Erik Greenwald

changed search output order to shallow followed by deep - Cliff Yapp

added search support for '.' object list search results - Cliff Yapp

red -f flag to force overwriting pre-existing combs - Sean Morrison

Kyle Bodt: Ronja

Ronja (Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access) is an innovative piece of equipment that utilizes reliable optical data links to create a current communication range of 1.4 km and a speed of 10Mbps full duplex that can be used as a general purpose wireless link for virtually any networking project. This is a very important project for Twibright Labs, a small group of computer science graduate students operating out of Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic. The group specializes in the usage of Free Software and User Controlled Technology Development.

The primary output for the Ronja project is a design. The lab does not intend to manufacture and sell the hardware that is being designed but wants to engage in open source development of the technology. The philosophy surrounding User Controlled Technology is the ideal that the end-user is provided with unrestricted access to the intellectual property surrounding the technology, including the tools that are being used to create it. One tool playing an integral part in the development of the Ronja designs is BRL-CAD. All of the models that Twibright labs use to display the different variants of their Ronja concept were created with the help of BRL-CAD. BRL-CAD has allowed the members of Twibright labs to create instructional diagrams so that the users and builders of their open source technology will be able to have the latest information with regard to the proper construction of a Ronja unit. The interactive geometry editor and ray-tracers in BRL-CAD are an integral part in the communication of design plans for Twibright labs and enables them to connect with the users, who are the driving force behind the User Controlled Technology ideal.

Initial Drafts

These are incomplete articles being worked on. Most articles should be between 250 and 500 words (not counting tables, labels, and diagrams) before they have enough content to be considered complete.

Cliff Yapp: NURBS Ray Tracing in BRL-CAD

Over the past year, an intense development effort by BRL-CAD's development team has successfully implemented raytracing of Non-Uniform Rational BSpline (NURBS) geometry within the BRL-CAD Computer-Aided Design (CAD) package. NURBS surfaces are very general, very complex mathematical shapes used by virtually all modern commercial CAD software packages. Because BRL-CAD did not originally support this type of geometry, commercial models could only be imported into BRL-CAD after a labor-intensive and difficult conversion process from NURBS form to triangle-base geometry (referred to in BRL-CAD as Bags-of-Triangles or BoTs). The new NURBS raytracing capability builds on work by many developers over a period of years, who in turn built on the open source library OpenNURBS. Support for this primitive type means BRL-CAD can now store and raytrace data from commercial models without requiring preliminary conversion to another type of geometry.

The last major feature needed to make import of commercial models in BRL-CAD straightforward is conversion support for ISO’s "Standard for the Exchange of Product model data" or STEP file format. STEP uses NURBS geometry in its definition, making support for NURBS geometry a necessary prelude to support for STEP import. Most commercial CAD modelers support this file format as an output option, hence STEP support in BRL-CAD would allow a direct path for moving geometric descriptions from a variety of commercial modelers to BRL-CAD. Considerable progress has already been made on STEP import support, but more work is need to bring the code and feature set to "production quality". If anyone would like to join the BRL-CAD open source development effort and has a little familiarity with C++, the step-g converter and its supporting libraries have some simple-yet-useful tasks that would be an excellent and very useful way to explore the project - join BRL-CAD's IRC channel or development email list if you are interested!

Erik Greenwald: Bolting ADRT's libtie under the hood

BoT vs Tie pixdiff

Initial progress on the integration of ADRT's libtie "triangle intersection engine" with LIBRT.

Idea Hopper

These are ideas for interesting or useful publications. We need someone to at least write a draft.

BRL-CAD's Evolutionary API

Talk about BRL-CAD deprecation process.

Introduction to new .deb and .rpm builds

Brief article overviewing the efforts by jordisayol for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. Included are new icons, menu items, mime type associations, and more.

2010 End Of Year Review

Article giving an overview of the past year's highlight developments with hints at what 2011 may bring. Alternatively, may be the annual statistics review if we switch from fiscal to calendar year reporting.

Erik Greenwald: ADRT/ISST Visualization

Article introducing ADRT/ISST core capability.

Bob Parker: Alpha Archer: Working Towards Next Generation MGED

Article introducing Archer's core new features that will be "coming" to MGED. Undo, interactive editing, tree view, and info panels come to mind.

Finding the Hot Spots

Article on the rt lighting model Stephen Kennedy developed that visualizes the time spent per-pixel.

Point Clouds

Article introducing the new point cloud primitive.

bn_mat_inv: singular matrix

Article on the v4 format and binary compatibility.

Model Showcase: Goliath

Article talking about the making of the Goliath model.

Model Showcase: Chumaciera

Article on Pedro Baptista's bearing model.

Model Showcase: Proyecto Catapulta

Article on a model developed by André Santos, António Almeida, and Pedro Ferreira.

Model Showcase: Union Coupling Tool

Article on a model developed by Inês de Matos under teacher Luís Ferreira. The project focuses on a tool, union coupling, based on the book, http://purl.pt/14352 , page 122 of the original book and page 128 of the file, figures 108 and 109.

Geometry Service FAQ

FAQ summarization of the GS as it pertains to the wider open source community.